Sapolsky

Another domain: the defining feature of our humanness—the golden rule—do unto to others. Every society has some version of that or the negative version—do not do unto others as you would not have them do to you. This is just universal. These are the building blocks of human morality, of our sense of justice. All sorts of work has been done on seeing this—how you build whole moral systems out of reciprocity.

Robert Sapolsky

Sapolsky

We are not the only species that kills in an organized way. These are chimpanzees carrying out what is called a “border patrol.” They are all from the same group. They have gotten in a very agitated state and they are off patrolling the border of their territory. And if they encounter a male from the neighboring group, they will kill him. This is planned, organized violence and has been documented a number of times now. The males of one group of chimps have eradicated every single male member of the neighboring group and expanded their territory. This is virtually the definition, by UN standards, of genocide: killing somebody not for who they are, but simply for what group they belong to. We are not the only species that does that. We are not the only species that is capable of deep unconscious aggressive bias against thems. Fascinating example of this: if you ever want to take a totally terrifying test, take something called “The Implicit Association Test”. It is this brilliant psychological test that reveals every unspoken prejudice and bias that you have going for you, because it is impossible to fool this test. Here is how the test works. Suppose you have a horrible, ugly, vicious prejudice against trolls. You just have something in for trolls and you think they are simply inferior to humans. So, you are given this task computer screen where up flash a bunch of pictures of either humans or trolls and you are instructed: “If it is a human, press this button on the right. If it is a troll, press this button on the left.” Or a series of words with either very positive or negative connotations: “If it is positive press this button; negative, press.” And then it comes in a combination. You have to see, “If it is a troll on the right or this kind of word, press this button; if it is a human on the left.” And what you see is, when the category of human and troll fits with the word, it is an easy association. Flash up a human with the word “trustworthy” and that makes perfect sense. Flash up malodorous with troll, that makes perfect sense. Your reaction time for hitting the correct button is very short. But now, switch it around the other way and for a minuscule amount of time, you pause and say, “Wait a second. Trolls are not kindhearted. That is right, hit this button.” “Wait a second. Humans are not bad, hit this button.” There is a minuscule-on-the-scale-of milliseconds delay. And you do enough of these and you can tell if somebody gets a delay coming in there—the scale of like a tenth-of-a-second delay—they are feeling the cognitive dissonance, “I do not associate these positive values with this group.” It is incredible. Then, recently a group—a Yale group—showed the exact same thing in rhesus monkeys. They took either pictures of monkeys from the same group as the individual they were testing—the male on the left—or someone from the next group over—a them—a very menacing them. So, either flashing up pictures of somebody of their own group or someone from the out-group; or flashing up pictures of wonderful positive things for monkeys, like tropical fruit, or negative things—spiders. And then you gave them the task that they would have to process pairs and you would see the exact same thing. When you would have discordant categories, it took slightly longer. The monkey was sitting there saying, “Wait a second. We are the ones that make me think of luscious tropical fruit and they’re like yucky spiders; not the other way around.” Other species can even think in terms of categories of prejudice. So, in what ways are we special when it comes to aggression? We are just like any other primate, in terms of our capacity to cudgel somebody over the head to death. We are perfectly capable of doing that, but we could be violent in all sorts of ways. We can exert no more effort than it takes to pull a trigger or release a bomb from thirty thousand feet or operate a drone on the other side of the planet. We can be aggressive by looking the other way and pretending we do not see or damning with faint praise or this concept utterly foreign to any other primate—we can be passive-aggressive. We can do it in all sorts of ways. Let me show you just how bizarre human violence can be. In the mid-1960s, there was a coup in Indonesia that overthrew the government there and instituted a rightwing dictatorship for the next 30 years that came to be known as The New Order. And in the aftermath of this coup, every vendetta, every bit of revenge was carried out against every ethnic minority group; against every sort of left leaning group out there. Death squads killed an estimated half a million people in Indonesia over the subsequent years. Entire villages of people would be burned to death in their huts, when death squads would come. So the writer V.S. Naipaul was traveling through Indonesia some decades afterward and was learning about the history of this whole period—the troubles during that time—and he kept hearing this story. Which was sometimes when these death squads would come to destroy a village, they would bring along a traditional Indonesian Gamelan orchestra. What the hell is with that? Totally bizarre. He kept hearing rumors about it. And one day, he encountered some grizzled old veteran of one of these death squads—unrepentant because he had just spent thirty years as a national hero— and Naipaul said, “I heard this rumor. Is this true?” And the guy said, “Oh, yes, yes. Whenever we would go to kill everyone in the village, we would bring along a Gamelan orchestra. It was great. We would bring along the flutists and the drummers, and the singers and all of that.” And Naipaul said, “Why would you do that?” And the man looked at him, puzzled, and said, “To make it more beautiful, of course.” There is no other primate out there that could begin to make sense of the ways in which we damage each other, if we can do something like that.

Robert Sapolsky

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

“In Arendt's reconstruction of "what exactly happened to Eichmann" there were three key ingredients. First, he never heard a word of questioning much less political debate among his peers or superiors.

Second, he received a clarifying idea, a "truth", from the SS head Heinrich Himmler. Mass killings, Himmler said, were a heroic task requiring great courage, loyalty to the Führer and ability to bear the suffering involved in being an executioner. A state executioner is a hero, tough, loyal and brave.

Third, Eichmann adopted a "different personal attitude" (in his own words). He became inured to seeing dead people all around him: "We did not care if we died today or only tomorrow."

Having redefined executioners as heroic sufferers and having stifled his empathy for human suffering, including his own, Eichmann was numb enough to follow his new conscience.

True villains and true psychopaths are, fortunately, rather rare; but, in the right circumstances, becoming unfeelingly obedient and inhuman in this way can become a common condition. When political life atrophies and debate and questioning cease, while thoughtful moral experience is blocked internally, the resulting capacity for evil can spread like an epidemic. Before she went to Jerusalem, Arendt had feared that thoughtlessness – “the headless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty”, as she described it in The Human Condition (1958) – had become “among the outstanding characteristics of our time”.

 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

The Fallacy of Simple Location and the Ontologies of Substance and Event (Abstract)

"The term “simple location” was coined by Alfred North Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World.1 It is a fallacy of simple location to attempt to locate concrete particulars in definite portions of space and time. According to Whitehead, there are three characteristics of space and time.2 First, entities are separated in space and separated in time. He calls this the “separative” character of space-time. Second, entities are also together in space and together in time, even if they are not contemporaneous. This is space-time’s “prehensive” character. Third, each entity in space has a definite limitation, which is why it has its own peculiar shape and none other and why it is in its specific locus and in none other’s. The temporal analogue of such characteristic is that an entity is said to endure through a defined period and in no other. This third characteristic of space-time, taken by itself, gives rise to the idea of simple location, which then holds that each bit of matter is individually independent. Hence, it is regarded as fully describable, apart from any reference to any other portion of matter. An entity could very well be the sole occupant of uniform space; but it would nonetheless remain the entity that it is. Any relation that may be held between itself and any of the other entities, should these other entities in fact exist, becomes of secondary importance and cannot constitute an explanation for its internal constitution.3 What is true of space is likewise true of time. Thus, any bit of matter could be adequately described without any reference to the past or the future. The bit of matter in question is fully itself in any subperiod, however short, and is equally itself at any instant of time. However, as Whitehead likewise points out: “This gives no more than an accidental character to the passage of time, as the bit of matter in question is itself indifferent to the division of time. Temporality cannot thus constitute the essence of the entity; it has nothing to do with the character of the material.”

Ferdinand Santos & Santiago Sia 

Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?

Achille Mbembe

 

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

James Baldwin

"With few notable exceptions (see Tyner and Rice 2015), relatively little has been written connecting Mbembe's necropolitical work with the idea of “structural violence” as posited by Johan Galtung (1969). This is surprising given that biological harm and the potentiality of death are central to necropower, which transcends the direct violence of genocide or active killing. Galtung has been highly influential in many academic fields, including sociology, anthropology and peace studies by defining “structural violence” as a means to analyse institutionalized forms of repression on Othered populations. He interrogates the idea of violence, arguing that it is “present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential” (1969:168). For Galtung, unlike “personal violence” by an individual “which shows” (1969:173), structural violence is more silent, more stealthy (see Li 2010)—concealed within the “hidden violence of abandonment” (Davies and Polese 2015:38). Structural violence maintains an unseen quality that is institutionalized within wider structures and therefore normalized (DeVerteuil 2015). In this way, violence can be seen as “a processual and unfolding moment, rather than as an ‘act’ or ‘outcome’” (Springer and Le Billon 2016:2). The spatialization of such suffering may not always be invisible in a literal sense, but the vulgar banality of structural brutality allows such everyday forms of violence to be hidden in plain view (Mbembe 1992). This theme is also taken up by Nixon (2011:2) who describes “slow violence” as a delayed destruction, occurring attritionally across space and time, and often out of sight. Structural violence tends to be latent rather than manifest. Yet it is also more consistent and more static, because unlike personal violence which is rarely legitimized explicitly by state authorities, structural violence is underpinned by social order itself (Galtung 1969:173). The notion of structural violence is also implicit within Mbembe's (2003) writing about the post-colony, in which necropolitics is framed as an institutional form of oppression upon the colonized body.

Galtung also distinguishes between the “physical” violence of being attached by direct contact such as being punched, burnt, poisoned or attacked with weapons, and “physiological” violence which is the denial of air, water, food or constrained movement (Galtung 1969:174). This latter form of violence is more likely to be structural in nature, and is evident in the empirical case study. Similarly, the “repressed topographies of cruelty” of which, Mbembe writes (2003:40), can also be interpreted as a spatialized form of structural and physiological violence. Structural violence takes place when certain people are “left to suffer in agonizing circumstances that are normalised through the law” (Gilbert and Ponder 2014). In these conditions, excluded groups may not be actively killed but are instead allowed to suffer the brutal indignity of harmful spatial environments. There is a danger of drawing too stark a divide between direct and structural violence (Loyd 2012; Tyner 2016b), indeed a violent accord can exist between them''.

Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee, Surindar Dhesi

 "For the wages of sin were visible everywhere...in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parceled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone’s bright son blown into eternity by his own hand."

James Baldwin

Mbembe

Today, reason is on trial in two ways. First, reason is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality, when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic processing of information. In other words, the logic of reason is morphing from within machines and computers and algorithms. The human brain is no longer the privileged location of reason. The human brain is being “downloaded” into nano-machines. An inordinate amount of power is gradually being ceded to abstractions of all kinds. Old modes of reasoning are being challenged by new ones that originate through and within technology in general and digital technologies in particular, as well as through the top-down models of artificial intelligence. As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason. Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly  weaponized. Time itself is becoming enveloped in the doing of machines. Machines themselves do not simply execute instructions or programs. They start generating complex behaviour. The computational reproduction of reason has made it such that reason is no longer, or is a bit more than, just the domain of human species. We now share it with various other agents. Reality itself is increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modelling, mathematics. Second, many are turning their back to reason in favour of other faculties and other modes of expression and cognition. They are calling for a rehabilitation of affect and emotions for instance. In many of the ongoing political struggles of our times, passion is clearly trumping reason. Confronted with complex issues, feeling and acting with one’s guts, viscerally rather than reasoning, is fast becoming the new norm.

Achille Mbembe

In many regions with conflicts, the effort to train and induce empathy has concentrated on individuals. However, these missions often lose sight of how empathy can work on groups, and how it shapes our social identities. 

Recent psychological research shows that there is a difference in how we use empathy among groups versus individuals. For example, multiple studies on Israelis and Palestinians reveal that people who engage in extreme violence do not necessarily lack empathy. Instead, they have high empathy for the group they belong to and low empathy for the group they oppose. If this is indeed the case, then inducing general empathy might actually motivate hostility towards some groups, a consequence that conflicts directly with our usual association between empathy and altruistic behavior.

When one group of people feels a decreased sense of empathy for another group, and a high sense of empathy for their own, it implies less motivation to help people from the “outside” group – even when they're suffering.

Examining empathy can sometimes feel like a study of the opposite: all the complex, tacit ways that humans reveal how self-involved we are. When we look at the pain of others, our personal lenses can distort our understanding of their pain and suffering. In a group, we accord values and meaning to "our" people, and diminish the value of those outside them. 

Yet despite these pervading instincts, there is reason to believe that our brains are wired to correct, and counteract such behaviors. Empathy might be distorted by feelings or swept aside by our choices, but it does not simply disappear. Through training and effort, at home and in society, with science and with art, we can learn to encourage empathy. It's time we called for a return to cooperation among many groups – in politics, education, and research – to work together to understand and combat empathy bias, and perhaps propel us towards an empathic rebellion.

Prabarna Ganguly

"In order to break the governmental relationship of obedience, the individual must withdraw her consent to be ‘conducted like that’. To do so, as we have seen, she has to contest and detach from the form of subjectivity that these specific govenmental techniques and a specific regime of truth aim at constituting and imposing on her. But contesting the form of subjectivity that is imposed on individuals in order to build another subjectivity is not an easy task''.

mental health

"Our magazine writers smile sadly at the old-time optimism of their country; are themselves full of forebodings; expend much force and enthusiasm and strong (as well as weak) English style in disclosing social evils and economics bugbears; are moved by a fine sympathy for the unfortunate and a fine anger against those who bring wrong upon their fellows: but where amidst all these themes for the conscience is there a theme for the courage of the reader? Where are the brave plans of reform which should follow such prologues? No man with a heart can withhold sympathy from the laborer whose strength is wasted and whose hope is thwarted in the service of the heartless and closefisted; but, then, no man with a head ought to speak that sympathy in the public prints unless he have some manly, thought-out ways of betterment to propose. One wearies easily, it must be confessed, of woful-warnings; one sighs often for a little tonic of actual thinking grounded in sane, clear-sighted perception of what is possible to be done. Sentiment is not despicable—it may be elevating and noble, it may be inspiring, and in some mental fields it is self-sufficing—but when uttered concerning great social and political questions, it needs the addition of practical initiative sense to keep it sweet and to prevent its becoming insipid''.

"Many affairs of life which were once easily to be handled by individuals have now become so entangled amongst the complexities of international trade relations, so confused by the multiplicity of news-voices, or so hoisted into the winds of speculation that only powerful combinations of wealth and influence can compass them. Corporations grow on every hand, and on every hand not only swallow and overawe individuals but also compete with governments. The contest is no longer between government and individuals; it is now between government and dangerous combinations and individuals''.

Woodrow Wilson

"What we call our mind has been shaped by a history of interacting with the world: from making hammers from stone, to making paint from berries, to making writing in wet clay, or scrolls, to dictionaries, maps, architectural drawings, and philosophical treatises. So the mind is not a special substance in humans, it is a pattern of habits formed by a long history of using tools and technics. Stiegler writes that there are not two entities, only one: world''.

Plastic Pills

Galeano

"Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
fucked every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world,

but in the crime reports of the local paper.

The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

Eduardo Galeano

 

 

Winston Churchill

Us vs. Them: The process of othering

     By Clint Curle



People are different. We can use our differences as an opportunity to share and learn or we can use our differences as an excuse to build walls between us. When we highlight differences between groups of people to increase suspicion of them, to insult them or to exclude them, we are going down a path known as “othering.”


Paul Herczeg remembers the precise moment he was made to feel fundamentally different. It happened in 1944, shortly after the Nazis invaded his home country of Hungary.

“It didn’t take very long before the edict came out – every Jew must wear a yellow star. This is the first time I realized that I’m different, even among my friends.”

 
               — Holocaust survivor Paul Herczeg


The Nazis used the yellow star to identify Jews as separate and inferior. Herczeg’s sense of being suddenly set apart as “different” is a result of the process of othering.

The process of othering can be divided into two steps: Categorizing a group of people according to perceived differences, such as ethnicity, skin colour, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Identifying that group as inferior and using an “us vs. them” mentality to alienate the group.

Othering involves zeroing in on a difference and using that difference to dismantle a sense of similarity or connectedness between people. Othering sets the stage for discrimination or persecution by reducing empathy and preventing genuine dialogue. Taken to an extreme, othering can result in one group of people denying that another group is even human.

Othering and the Holocaust


An extreme example of othering and its consequences is found in the Holocaust – the systematic persecution and murder of six million Jews organized by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1933 to 1945.

In addition to committing genocide against the Jews, the Nazis committed genocide against the Roma and the Sinti. Many other groups, including people with disabilities, homosexual men, Slavic peoples, political opponents and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also violently persecuted during this period.

The Nazi party divided humans into two categories: the so‐called “Aryans” (the Germanic people) whom they considered genetically superior; and the so‐called “inferior races” composed of Jews, along with Slavs, Roma and Sinti, and Blacks. This ranking of some groups of people as “lesser than” was a process of othering that helped create the conditions for the genocide.


Paul Herczeg’s story


Paul Herczeg lived through this experience of othering. He was born in 1930 in Újpest, Hungary. His parents were proud Hungarians and traditional Jews. Like many young people around him, Paul joined the Jewish Boy Scouts Association and participated in many sports and cultural activities at school.

When Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, Paul and his family were forced to wear a yellow star. Later that year, they were forced to move into the Újpest ghetto. In July 1944, Paul and his parents were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Paul’s mother was murdered in Auschwitz, but he and his father were spared and transported to a small camp near Mühldorf, Germany to work as slave labourers. His father died from overwork and starvation.

Paul was sent to work in the camp kitchen, and he credits the heating in the building and the potato peels he hid under his clothes for saving his life.

The violence and suffering inflicted on Paul, his family, and the millions of other victims of the Nazis were enabled by the psychological and social power of othering.

Learn more:

Teaching resources: Holocaust

Browse Resources Teaching resources: Holocaust

A Yiddish poem from the Holocaust

Explore Story A Yiddish poem from the Holocaust

The stain of antisemitism in Canada

Explore Story The stain of antisemitism in Canada


Othering and the Rohingya genocide


The process of othering plays an important part in many other human rights violations, such as the recent genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

The Rohingya are a mostly Muslim minority that make up one‐third of the population in a region of Myanmar called Rakhine State. Although they have been in the region since the 15th century, Rohingya continue to be viewed by the Buddhist majority of Rakhine state as “Bengali immigrants”. This labelling is an example of the othering process that denies the Rohingya their status as fellow citizens.

Since the early 1980s, government policies have stripped Rohingya of citizenship and enforced a system where they were first isolated and marginalized and then targeted for genocide.


In 2012, violence broke out in Rakhine state, killing hundreds and displacing thousands of Rohingya. After an attack on a border post in 2016, in which police officers were killed by Rohingya fighters, Myanmar’s military launched a crackdown. The military action, consisting of a wave of village burnings, murders and rapes, forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Violence against Rohingya has escalated since then, leading to the acknowledgement of genocide‐like crimes by the United Nations and the Canadian government in 2018.

Yasmin Ullah’s story


Yasmin Ullah, a Rohingya Canadian, was born in 1992 to Rohingya parents in Buthidaung, Myanmar. When she was three years old, Yasmin was forced to flee Myanmar with her parents due to the increasing hate, persecutions, and human rights violations that the Rohingya of Myanmar experienced.

In Thailand, Yasmin and her family were stateless, meaning they did not have the protection of any kind of national citizenship, and faced constant threats of deportation. Yasmin remembers how her grandmother’s citizenship document was taken away from her and she was given a different card which identified her not as a Myanmar citizen, but as Bengali Muslim. This process of being denied citizenship and being singled out as different is another form of othering.

When Yasmin was 19 years old, her father met two Canadian missionaries who had heard him speaking about the persecution of the Rohingya. They offered to help him come to Canada with his family. There were many obstacles to this process because the family was stateless, but they finally acquired exit permits and came to Canada as refugees in 2011.

If you are deemed different, or your culture is different, you are pushed aside. You are deemed unworthy. You are deemed unimportant to talk to.

                       Yasmin Ullah


Learn more:

Time to Act: Rohingya Voices

Exhibition details Time to Act: Rohingya Voices

Rohingya women call for justice

Explore Story Rohingya women call for justice

Resource guide: Rohingya

Explore Resource Guide Resource guide: Rohingya

How can we recognize othering?


Othering can be done by governments, as in the case of the Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars or Myanmar declaring Rohingya to be non‐citizens. Not all othering is obviously violent or repressive, though.

Long before the Nazi government passed laws officially targeting Jews, they used propaganda to spread false and insulting antisemitic stereotypes about Jews. The circulation of hateful and divisive ideas is a kind of social othering that can set the stage for more violent acts.

This kind of othering can also take place in popular culture, everyday conversation, and online interactions. Othering is at work when people use images and words that distort, insult, exclude, or dismiss another group of people. It can take the form of jokes or insults that can be hurtful and isolating, setting some people apart as inferior or different. Othering can also be seen when people reject ideas they disagree with by resorting to stereotypes that insult or attack the people who express them.

If these othering opinions spread unchallenged, they are more likely to be accepted as normal or true. And then it becomes easier for governments and other groups to enact repressive laws or take violent action against the people who have been othered.

This is why it is so important to recognize and resist othering in all its forms.

Why does othering happen?


The process of othering can happen for many reasons. When times are tough because of economic, political, or environmental problems, people sometimes look for someone to blame. They are more likely to target groups with little power or who have been oppressed in the past by the effects of othering.

Also, people often try to make sense of our confusing and constantly changing world by relying on oversimplified or outdated ideas about history or about differences between groups of people. When these ideas involve prejudiced generalizations, they can contribute to othering.

People sometimes use othering to make themselves feel more secure or powerful. This is most obvious when leaders try to drum up support by using othering to attack their opponents or groups of people they want to turn into an enemy. But this can also happen in everyday life when people use insults or exclusion to make themselves feel better at the expense of others.

Othering at work around us


The process of othering can be seen in many different situations. Paul and Yasmin lived through extreme events. But othering happens in smaller ways too. It is important to understand that if we highlight a person's differences, we risk treating that person differently.

Almost all human rights violations are rooted in othering. Understanding and identifying the process of othering is an important first step in stopping them.

Can you look at your own life and see othering at work?


This story draws on and is intended to support the “Us vs. Them – Creating the Other learning resources co‐developed by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

Ask yourself:


How do I handle discomfort with difference?


Can I think of any groups of people who experience othering in my community or country?


Have I ever felt more powerful by excluding someone?

 Social death is the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society. It is used by sociologists such as Orlando Patterson and Zygmunt Bauman, and historians of slavery and the Holocaust to describe the part played by governmental and social segregation in that process.^[1][2] Examples of social death are:

• Racial and gender exclusion, persecution, slavery, and apartheid.^[3][4][5]
• Governments can exclude individuals or groups from society. Examples: Protestant minority groups in early modern Europe; ostracism in Ancient Athens; Dalits in India; criminals; prostitutes, outlaws^[6][7]
• Institutionalization and segregation of those labeled with a mental illness.
• Change in the identity of an individual. This was a major theme during the Renaissance.

Slavery and Social Death[edit]

The chief proponent of the relationship between social death and slavery is Orlando Patterson, who states his findings in his 1982 book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Patterson first defines slavery as "one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and of total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave."^[8] Social death had both internal and external effects on enslaved people, changing their views of themselves and the way they were regarded by society. Slavery and social death can be linked in all civilizations where slavery existed, including China, Rome, Africa, Byzantium, Greece, Europe, and the Americas.^[9]

The beginning of social death comes from the initial enslavement process, which would most likely come from capture during a battle. A captive would be spared from death and created a slave, although this was a conditional commutation since death was only suspended as long as the slave submitted to his powerlessness. This pardon from death was replaced with social death, which would manifest both physically and psychologically.^[10]

Externally, slaves would undergo the loss of their identities through such practices as replacing their names, being branded to indicate their social condition, given a specific dress code that further established them as slaves to the public, castration, and having their heads shaved.^[11] Each of these acts alienated the slaves from their previous identities and symbolized their loss of freedom and power and their total dependency on their master’s will. The psychological process of social death included the effect of rejection as a member of society and becoming genealogically isolated through the loss of heritage and the right to pass on their ancestry to their children.^[12] In fact, all social bonds were seen as illegitimate unless they were validated by the master. Enslaved people were denied an independent social structure and were not even deemed fully human, as they were only seen as a representation of their master and had no honor or power of their own.^[13] The degree to which these practices took place was based on the two modes of social death, intrusive and extrusive. In the intrusive mode, rituals were developed for the incorporation of an external enemy into the culture as a slave. In the extrusive mode, traditions evolved for including those who have "fallen into slavery" from within society into the slave status.^[14] Both of these modes provided a process for the institutionalization of socially dead individuals.

Power played an essential role in the relationship between a slave and master, and violence was often deemed a necessary component of slavery. A slave was seen to have no worth. They had no name of their own and no honor. Instead, their worth and honor was transferred to the master and gave him an elevated social status among his peers.^[15] Violence within the relationship was considered essential because of the low motivation of the enslaved people, and it was also a factor in creating social death and exercising power over the slaves. Whipping was not only a method of punishment but also a consciously chosen symbolic device to remind slaves of their status.^[16] This physical violence had other psychological effects as well, gradually creating an attitude of self-blame and an acknowledgement of the complete control that a master had. Interviews with former American slaves included statements such as "slaves get the masters they deserve" and "I was so bad I needed the whipping", demonstrating the justification that slaves had no right to expect kindness or compassion because of their status in society and the devastating mental effects from social death.^[17]

These effects demonstrated the expectations of the behavior of a slave who had experienced social death. The individuals viewed as the ultimate slaves, the palace eunuchs from Byzantium and China, were essentially a paradox. These slaves were trusted by emperors and could be extremely influential. They were expected to be loyal, brave, and obedient, yet they were still considered low and debased and were shunned by society.^[18]

While Orlando Patterson gives the most extensive study on slavery and social death, he has several critics of his analysis. Those who reviewed the book disliked his refusal to define slaves as property because other groups could fit this definition as well, including women and children.^[19] Patterson also does not compare the treatment of slaves to other socially marginalized groups, such as prostitutes, criminals, and indentured servants.^[20] The third critique given...is the lack of primary sources. Commentators noted that the argument in Slavery and Social Death would have been much stronger had Patterson utilized testimony from enslaved people of their views and meanings of honor, domination, and community.^[21]

Wikipedia

"As a person who rarely speaks, and often appears not to be listening, the visuals and narrative of the film show us that any assumptions of a lack of communication skills is profoundly wrong. This alone could be seen to challenge common, and potentially ableist, assumptions about communication and social life.''

Alison Wilde

Segall (excerpt)

 

Introduction: The Physics of Consciousness

“Humans are blobs of organized mud.” So begins physicist Sean Carroll’s popular book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself (2016). His book aims to show how atoms in motion according to the laws of physics could give rise to the full array of human values and meaning, including all our thinking, feeling, and willing. Process philosophers generally eschew such “brilliant feats of explaining away,”[5] instead viewing these hardcore commonsense[6] capacities not only as essential ingredients making possible the civilized phases of human society (including the scientific enterprise itself), but also as high-grade exemplifications of powers latent throughout the physical universe. Such powers—which we have direct practical experience of in our own consciousness—count as evidence that any comprehensive cosmology needs to account for. Carroll leans on his scientific credentials to assure us that even our most prized “inner experiences” can only really be “a way of talking about what is happening in the brain.”[7] While he does want to find some way of poetically resurrecting a self-made meaning worth living for, Carroll remains a hard-nosed physicalist generally adhering to the dictum that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But what if our feelings are among the facts? What if, indeed, feeling is the only medium through which facts might come to matter?

This paper aims to bring natural science to its senses. Physicists like Carroll may call themselves physicalists, but I hope to show that the project of “explaining away” that he is engaged in, while brilliant in its clever use of abstractions, is really a confused form of model-centric idealism. Contemporary physical cosmology is suffering from a bad case of misplaced concreteness due to the lingering residue of unresolved Kantianism. As an aid to my aim, this paper continues prior efforts to read Whitehead’s philosophy of organism as a descendent of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and, to state the same in reverse, to interpret Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a precursor of process philosophy.[8] Situating Whitehead’s cosmological scheme in lineage with Schelling’s philosophy of nature invites a dialogue with Kant, both in his pre-critical cosmological phase and in his later turn to transcendental idealism. Like Whitehead, Schelling philosophically generalized the findings of the new paradigm sciences of his day to articulate a vision of cosmogenesis as a panpsychic process of dynamic evolution. Also like Whitehead, his core premise was that Kant’s critical appraisal of sense perception unduly severed the conscious mind from its roots in a living ground: “Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only both together can constitute a living whole.” Living nature, Schelling continued, is the medium within which mind becomes real by taking on flesh and blood.[9] Whitehead similarly complained that Kant’s distorted treatment of perception as a merely subjective process uprooted from anything real left natural philosophy floating in the thin air of abstract modes of thought grasping for artificial sources of experiential togetherness, as if the mere appearance of an objective world might satisfy our thirst for knowledge.[10]

Though often characterized as an absolute idealist, Schelling can and has been read as a radical empiricist.[11] Through his influence on scientific giants like Alexander von Humboldt, he made important contributions to the development of what we nowadays refer to as an ecological worldview.[12] Despite his rejection of the mechanistic materialism guiding most modern scientific inquiry, historians of science have argued that the omission of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie from the historiography of nineteenth-century physics “impoverishes our understanding of it.”[13] In his final public lectures in Berlin in 1842, Schelling called German philosophers to take up a deeper empiricism no longer artificially limited to the “mere sensation” of the outward facing senses but inclusive of the “inner sense of the emotions” or feelings, which he adds “is a sense that still very much needs a critique.”[14] In his Gifford lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1927 and later published as Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead “[aspired] to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason.”[15] He was not conscious of having answered Schelling’s call, but I hope to show that answer it he did. His aspiration was to invert Kantian transcendentalism so as to reconnect the human mind and its scientific knowledge with the physical world it desires to know (an inversion I have elsewhere characterized as “descendental philosophy”[16]): “For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world—a ‘superject’ rather than a ‘subject.’”[17] Reimagining physics within the bounds of feeling alone entails overcoming the bifurcation of nature so as to understand how it “is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life.”

Mathew Segall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Much has happened in the modern world to make men feel that they do not belong. Living in a world which has become oppressively impersonal, many of us have come to feel that we are little more than numbers. Bewildered by this tendency to reduce man to a card in a vast index, he desperately searches...

Martin Luther King

 

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

Paul K. Piff [email protected], Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, +1, and Dacher Keltner